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The Part About Archimboldi
This is a guide to 'The Part About Archimboldi'. pg. 658 Chance or the devil had it that the book Hans Reiter chose to read was Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. Natasha Wimmer: "Von Eschenbach qualifies as another of Bolaño’s preferred marginal writers--an outlier among courtly poets--notable for criticizing other writers--not known for his style (anti-style, like Parra). pg. 710 And it was around this time that he met Efraim Ivanov, the science fiction writer Natasha Wimmer: "Soviet science fiction had two heydays, the first immediately after the Revolution and the second from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. Ivanov belongs to the first period, though he expires with the movement in the Great Purges of the 1930s. He doesn't seem to be modeled on any writer in particular, though his pre-Ansky fiction fits the mold of early Soviet utopian storytelling. Bolaño also gives a nod to the great dystopian Soviet writer Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (Ursula Le Guin called his novel We 'the best single work of science fiction yet written') when he names Ansky's lover Marya Zamyatina. pg. 729 It's in Ansky's notebook, long before he sees a painting by the man, that Reiter first reads about the Italian painter Arcimboldo, Giuseppe or Joseph or Josepho... There are also notes on Courbet, whom Ansky considers the paradigm of the revolutionary artist. Natasha Wimmer: "Works of visual art are nearly as central to 2666 as literary works. Whether fictional (Edwin Johns and his self-portrait with mummified hand; Conrad Halder and his paintings of dead women) or real, they tend toward the ghostly, grotesque, otherworldly. Besides Courbet, Bolaño makes reference to Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Odilon Redon, and Gustave Moreau (whose Jupiter and Semele is reproduced on the jacket of the English edition of 2666 ''original first edition). In a story from the posthumous collection ''El Secreto del mal (2007), Bolaño has more to say about Moreau: 'I thought...about Moreau's belle inertie, his beautiful inertia, the method by which Moreau was able to freeze, stop, fix any scene, tumultuous as it might be, on his canvases.... the Moreau stillness, some critics call it. The Moreau dread, it's called by others less fond of his work. Terror inlaid with gems.' See also 'The Outsider Ape' in The Romantic Dogs: 'Remember the Triumph of Alexander the Great, by Gustave Moreau? / The beauty and terror, the crystal moment when / all breathing stops.'" pg. 734 But the paintings of the four seasons were pure bliss. Everything in everything, writes Ansky. As if Arcimboldo had learned a single lesson, but one of vital importance. Natasha Wimmer: "In Arcimboldo's Spring alone, according to a recent Guardian review of a show at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, 'eighty flora have been identified... including dog rose and columbine, strawberries and spinach leaves, jasmine and nettles.' Something like this meticulous maximalism is apparent elsewhere in 2666, in Bolaño's cataloging of species of seaweed and methods of divination, for example. In choosing Giuseppe Arcimboldo as the namesake for Benno von Archimboldi, Bolaño was surely also aware of the painter's influence on the Surrealists (Arcimboldo was included in the 1937 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art) and thus of the conjunction of Renaissance invention and the 20th century avant-garde." pg. 735 They also make love in groups. The poet, his wife, and another woman. The poet, his wife, and another man. Natasha Wimmer: "This from a short nonfiction piece by Bolaño collected in Entre parentesis: 'A few days ago I read that Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, exceptional reader, author of two memoirs, one of them called Hope Against Hope, and the wife of the assassinated poet Osip Mandelstam, took part in, according to her most recent biography, menages a trois with her husband and that the news had caused shock and disappointment among her admirers, who took her for a saint. I, however, was happy to hear it. I knew that in the middle of winter Nadezhda and Osip didn't freeze and it confirmed for me that at least they tried to read all the books.'" pg. 887 The style was strange. The writing was clear and sometimes even transparent, but the way the stories followed one after another didn't lead anywhere.'' Natasha Wimmer: "It could be argued that the non-sequiter is Bolaño's trademark literary device, and that in it reside all the temptations and terrors of the random. This is evident in both his storytelling and his imagery. Each section of ''2666 is increasingly a collection of stories within a story, culminating in the Ansky narrative in Part V, which itself breaks down into any number of side-stories. A disquisition on Courbet leads to the following cascade: 'The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine recalls spies or shipwrecked sailors enjoying a brief rest, and Ansky goes on to say: spies from another planet, and also: bodies that wear out more quickly than other bodies, and also: disease, the transmission of disease, and also: the willingness to stand firm, and also: where does one learn to stand firm? in what kind of school or university? And also: factories, desolate streets, brothels, prisons, and also: the Unknown University.' In an insightful essay on 2666 ('Secreto y simulacro en 2666 de Roberto Bolaño,' Estudios Filologicos), Patricia Espinosa calls this tendency in Bolaño an 'anarchizing rebellion, an impulse toward permanent revolution... the logic of dispersion.' Bolaño certainly scorns the kind of rote rationalism exemplified by the graduate students he lampoons in Part I ('rational thinkers' and nouveaux youths'), though he is not averse to an unvarnished plainness. The combination of the random and the everyday creates a novel effect described by Benjamin Kunkel in the London Review of Books. He discusses it in connection with the short story 'Enrique Martin' but it applies to Bolaño's fiction in general: 'You don't feel that Enrique Martin is a robust character inhabiting a well-made story; you feel--whether or not any real-life original existed--something perhaps more powerful and certainly, in fiction, more unusual: namely, that he is simply a person, and that instead of having a story he had a life.'"